It’s easy to fall in love with big, flashy games. Partly because most of the big AAA titles are guaranteed to give you hours of playtime and enough variety to keep you hooked, and because those big AAA titles are always oh-so flashy.
However, most smaller indie titles don’t have the same glitz and glamour to captivate their players and fall back on. Instead, they need to craft a story and world that’s so fascinating that players stick around, not for what is on the outside but for what lies within.
When I started Planet of Lana, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure, on the surface, it looked pretty enough but many games look pretty on the surface, and I wasn’t sure there would be enough substance to the story or gameplay to stand out. How wrong I was.
I don’t remember when I last sat down and played an indie game that could wiggle into my heart as quickly and effectively as Planet of Lana did within the first twenty minutes. The game opens with a lighthearted and cheerful tone, where you play as a young girl, joyfully racing her sister through their home village.
But before you even know it’s happened, the tone has completely shifted. The once bright and welcoming areas are now painted in a dark sense of foreboding as monstrous machines come down from the sky and capture your, sorry, Lana’s sister.
The rest of the story progresses as you’d imagine, with Lana setting out to find her sister and save her home from those fearsome machines. I won’t touch on the story any further because it deserves to be experienced and uncovered by the player, but I do want to talk about tone.
The tone is something that Planet of Lana masterfully plays with and wealds like a weapon from beginning to end. Even in the opening section, the stark contrast between playing through the same area minutes apart and having joyful laughter replaced with terrified screams is delightfully poignant. It’s something that kept me playing the game and kept the game in my mind long after the end credits rolled.
At its core, Planet of Lana is a cinematic adventure about the bond between the ones we love and those we choose to journey with. The game is stunningly beautiful in its hard-painted art style. With a score from Takeshi Furukawa, who many might know from his work on The Last Guardian composer, Planet of Lana is a pleasure to listen to, look at, and play.
Although the game is about saving those you love from the machines, you can only fight them indirectly. The game relies on companion-based puzzle solving and stealth to bypass the machines.
Very early in the game, Lana is joined on her perilous journey by Mui, her cat companion, and both Lana and Mui have distinct strengths and weaknesses, making for a uniquely challenging puzzle-solving mechanic.
Each machine players encounter moves in different ways and patterns, meaning players will need to figure out new ways to bypass each type of machine. And to keep things interesting, the machines evolve and don’t always have the same pattern or movement pattern, meaning the game is constantly challenging all the way through.
On top of that, another layer of complexity comes in with moving Lana and Mui around. Because each character has their own strength and weakness, they can only access certain areas. Hence, they must work together to solve puzzles and make it through.
On an elementary level, Mui, a cat, is afraid of water, so it’s up to Lana to figure out how to safely get her feline companion across those areas. Likewise, Mui is small and agile, so he can reach high ledges and squeeze through tight gaps.
The real beauty of Planet Of Lana doesn’t lie in any part of the game; instead, it’s the sum of its parts. There is a synergy to everything in the game that I couldn’t help but fall in love with, and before I even knew it had happened, I had fallen in love with the game and all that it represents.
